YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Frank

lines on the record: 241
first: 2024-12-22
most recent: 2024-12-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“But see, what all those do is like just the idea of, say, like physicalism versus idealism, which are kind of the two philosophical schools you can go with. Physicalism says all that exists is physical. Idealism says all that exists is mind. We're actually saying, look, both of these, to take either of those positions, is already to project out into that third person view, right? And that third person view, we want to really emphasize, is a fiction. It's a useful fiction when you're doing science, right? If I want to do like, you know, the Newtonian physics of billiard balls on a pool table, great. I don't want to have to think about experience at all, right? But if I'm asking deeper questions, I can't ignore the fact that there really is no third-person view and that any story I tell about the world is coming from, it's not just first person, but it's literally, because I'm going to argue that experience always involves all of us, experience always originates out of a community.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They reject science. I absolutely agree. Yeah, no, that was a problem. Like when you saw, so like I said, you know, my first book was about science and human spirituality. So I was trying to say that like, you know, science is actually, if we look at what happens in human spirituality, not religion. Religion is about politics, right? But about, you know, the entire history of the species, we've had this experience of for better lack of a better word the sacredness. I'm not connecting this god or anything. I'm just saying this experience of like the more. And then with the new atheist movement, you got people saying that anybody who feels that is an idiot. You know, they just can't handle the hardcore science, when in fact their views of the world are so denuded, they can't even see the role that experience plays and how they came up with their formal systems, you know, and experience fundamentally is weird, you know, mysterious. It's like it's, you know, kind of goes down forever in some sense. There is always more. So yeah, that arrogance then just if you're telling everybody who's not hardcore enough to do the, you know.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of experience by kind of just ignoring it completely. So there's no other truth. Art, music, you know, human spirituality, it's all actually reducible just to neural correlates. So that's one way that it's been dealt with. The other way is this sort of, right? You've got on the postmodern left, academic left, you get this thing like science is just a game. It's just a game from the powerful come up with, which is also not true. Science is totally potent and requires an account for what is happening. So that's another way to push sort of science away or respond to it. The denial science denial that happens, that's also another way of sort of not understanding the balance that science is trying that we need to establish with experience. And then there's just pseudoscience, which wants to sort of say like, oh, you know, the new age movement or whatever, which wants to have, you know, wants to deal with experience by kind of elevating it in this way.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got the experience. So that's called the amnesia of experience. So that's what we mean by how the blind spot emerges, how we end up, how science purposely pushes experience out of the way so it can make progress. But then it forgets that experience was important. So where does this show up? Why is this, you know, what are the responses to trying to get this back in and where this crisis of meaning emerge? So scientific triumphalism is the idea that the only thing that's true for us are scientific truths, right? Unless it can be codified in a formal system and represented as data, you know, captured in some kind of scientific causal network, it doesn't even exist, right? And anything else that's not part of it can be formalized in that way is an epiphenomenon. It's not real. So, you know, scientific triumphalism is this response to the mystery, you know, the weirdness of, you know, I could call it the mystery.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we have thermometry. Yay, we have a way of sort of like having a structural invariant of this sort of very personal experience of hot or cold. And then from that, we can come up with thermodynamics, et cetera. And then we end up at the bottom of, you know, at the end of that with this idea of like every day I wake up and I check my phone and I'm like, oh, it's going to be 60 degrees out. Great. And we start thinking that 60 degrees is more real than hot and cold. That thermodynamics, the whole formal structure of thermodynamics is more real than the basic experience of hot and cold that it came from. It required that bodily experience that also, not just me, you, I have to tell you, it's part of my communication with you. Cold a day, isn't it? Right, that from that basic irreducible experience of being in the world, you know, with everything that involves, I developed degrees Celsius, but then I forgot about.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So think about degree Celsius, right? We kind of have in modern scientific culture we live in, we think like, oh yeah, degree Celsius, they're out there, it's a molecular cloud in space is 10 degrees Kelvin. The way we got there is we've forgotten how that idea is rooted in experience, right? We started off with science by, we had the experience, the subjective experience of hot and cold. I feel hot. I feel cold. You feel hot. You feel cold. Science was this process of trying to extract from those experiences what Michelle Bitbowl, a philosopher, calls the structural invariance, the things that we could both kind of agree on. So, you know, we figured out like, oh, we could make a gradiated little cylinder that's got mercury in it. And that, you know, hot things will be higher in that grade-aided cylinder, cold things will be lower. And we can both kind of figure out what we're going to agree on are our standards for that.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't reduce what happens in science to some sort of formal, real, a lot of it is about we love our formal systems, you know, our mathematics, and we're substituting, that's one of the things that there's two philosophers we really like or heroes. One is Herseral, who is a mathematician who invented phenomenology, and the other is Whitehead, who is one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century. And her struggle came up with this idea, the surreptitious substitution. Part of the blind spot is substituting a formal system, a calculus of data for actual experience, that that's more important than... And so let me just do, before I go to those three responses, let's just do the parable of temperature because I think people can help them understand what we mean.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right. So the crisis of meaning is that, you know, on the one hand, science wants to tell us that we're insignificant, we're not important, we're just, you know, biological machines. And, you know, so we're basically an insignificant part of the universe. On the other hand, we also find ourselves being completely significant in cosmology. We have to figure out how to look from the inside at cosmology. We're always the observers. We're at the center of this collapsing wavefront of light. Quantum mechanics, it really comes in. It comes in. The measurement problem just puts us front and center and we've spent 100. Some people spend 100 years trying to ignore the measurement part of the measurement problem. So on the one hand, we're insignificant. And on the other hand, we're central. So which one is it, right? And so this all comes from not understanding actually the foundational role of experience, this inability we can't, we can't do science without already being present in the world.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Verb kind of in a way or it's verb like. So yeah, and that this by being blind to that, end up with these paradoxes and problems that really not only block science, but also have been detrimental to society as a whole, especially where we're at right now.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How you build the parable of temperature that we call it. So what is Pinned on and to tell us that this is what science says. So, what is it? One is reductionism that you are nothing but your nerve cells, which are nothing but the chemistry, which is nothing but, you know, all the way down to quarks. That's it. So that's reductionism. The objective frame that science gives us this God's eye view, this third person view of the world, to view the world from the outside. That's what science bequeaths to us that view. Physicalism. that everything in the world is basically made of stuff. There's nothing else to talk about, right? That that's all there is and everything can be reduced to that. And then also the reification of mathematics, that mathematics is somehow more real than this. And there's a bunch of other things. But all these together, what they all do is they end up pushing experience out and saying experience is an epiphenomena. Consciousness. I tend not to use the word consciousness because I think it, you know, it leads us in the wrong direction. We should focus on experience.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The precondition for the possibility of science. And the whole nature of science, the way it has evolved, is that it purposely pushed that out. It pushed that out so it could make progress. And that's fine for certain class of problems. But when we try to answer and go deeper, there's a whole other class of problems, the nature of consciousness, the nature of time, quantum mechanics. That comes back to Bitus. And that if we don't learn how to take understand that that is always the background, that experience is always the background, then we just end up with these paradoxes and these yoga that require this intellectual yoga to get out of.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Direct experience, there is presence, being the life world within the philosophy called phenomenology. There's the life world. It's this sort of raw presence that you can't get away from until you die. And then who the hell knows, you know? As long as you're around, it's there. And what we're saying is that that is the way to say this, that is the...”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the idea of the blind spot is that there is this thing that is central to science. So the blind, we're using the blind spot as a metaphor, right? So the eye has an optic nerve, and the optic nerve is what allows vision to happen. So you can't have vision without the optic nerve. But actually, you're blind to the optic nerve. There's a little hole in your vision where the optic nerve is. And what we're saying is that science has something like this. There is something that without which science would not be possible, but that science, the way it's been configured. And actually, when we mean the blind spot, I'll get into exactly what I mean, what it is, but it's not really science. It is a set of ideas that got glued onto science. It's a metaphysics that got glued onto science. And so what is that thing that is, what is the blind spot? It's experience. It is presence. And by experience, people have to be very careful because I'm not talking about being an observer. It's lots of words for it.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“from by viewing it from the inside because it's really about the verb to be right really what is the most what is the most impressing philosophical question beyond science is the verb to be what is what is being right uh this is what stephen hawking said when you talked about what what what puts the fire in the equations the fire right the fire is this this presence and this is where it touches things like you know whatever you want to say it the sacred spirituality however you want to talk about my first book was about science and and human spirituality um so it's like you know so this question of life what makes life as a physical system you know so different is to me much more because it's you know that's where being appears being doesn't appear out there right the only place that ever appears to any of us is us so you know i can do this kind of projection into this third person thing but nobody ever has that that god's eye view that's a story we tell this is where you know this between us”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've evolved in this, right? You know, I started off as a theoretical physicist. I went into computational astrophysics and magnetohydrodynamics of star formation. But I always, I was a philosophy miner. I always had these sort of bigger questions sort of floating around the back of my mind. And what I've come to now is the most important question for physics is what is life? What the hell is the difference between a rock and a cell, fundamentally? And what I really mean by this, and this is where I'm going to go non-traditional, is that really the fundamental question that is, is agency, what does it mean to be an autonomous agent? How the hell does that happen? You know, it's so, I'm not a reductionist. I'm not somebody who's just like, well, you just put together enough chemicals and bing, bang, boom, and, you know, it suddenly appears. There's something really is going to demand a reconception of what nature itself is. And so, yeah, black holes are super cool. Cosmology is super cool. But really, this question of what is life, especially”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's a part of a fundamental definition of what it means to be alive. It goes past itself. So give life enough time, you know. And what are the end result? Like, you know, there's, you know, like that's why I love science fiction so much. At some point, does life reach a point where it climbs into the laws of physics itself? It becomes the laws of physics. Or, you know, these sort of lie at the extreme limits of thinking about what we mean by reality, what we mean by experience. But I'm not sure there was much we can do with them scientifically. But they're open-ended question about the open-ended nature of what it means to be alive and what life can do.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I made the claim that the most important finding life, any kind of life, would be the most important discovery in human history. And one of the reasons is, again, as I said, that, you know, life, if we're not an accident and there's other life, then there's probably lots of other life. And because the most significant thing about life is it can innovate, right? If I give you a star and tell you the mass and the composition, you can basically pretty much use the laws of physics, tell exactly what's going to happen to that star over its entire life timetable. Maybe not the little tiny details, but overall, it's going to be a white dwarf. It's going to be a black hole, end of story. If I gave you a single cell and said what's going to happen in a few billion years, you'd never be able to predict a giant rabbit that can punch you in the face, right? A kangaroo. So life has this possibility of innovating, of being creative. So here's, so what it means is...”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the plot actually of a great science fiction book called Eon by Greg Baer. And the idea was these sort of, you know, this is actually where my first, I became sort of more than agnostic, anti-medi, because the idea is that, yes, are aliens come.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, if you had to listen, that's why, again, I think UAPs absolutely UAP should be studied scientifically. But if I had to make a bet, and it's just a bet, I would say this is pure state adversary stuff. When I did, I did a New York Times op-ed for this in 2021, which blew up. And so, you know, I had a lot of people talking to me. While I was doing that, I sort of looked at the signals intelligence people, the SIGINT and ENT electronic intelligence communities and what they were saying about the New York Times articles and the various videos. And really none of them were talking about UFOs. They were all talking about, you know, pure state. That's where I learned the word pure state adversaries. How like even simple drone technologies you can, you know, and you want to, you purposely want to do this. You want to fake signals into the electronic of their adversary. So they crank it up. So then you can just soak up all the electromagnetic radiation.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We keep seeing them. We keep seeing them, but then they disappear, right? I mean, explain to me what rational world that works under. So there's that whole sort of argument you've got to explain, like, why if they want to stay hidden, are they so bad at it? So, you know, that's why I take that level of difficulty. And then I put it on top of where should I look? I should look at the, you know, I should look at where they're from that makes me want to look at do the telescopic stuff.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, God, looking out, looking out. Because that's the best, you know, as I always like to say, here's my codification of this. If you said, hey, Adam, I'd like to find some Nebraskans. And I said, oh, good, let's go to the Himalayas. You know, you'd be like, why am I going there? I'm like, well, you know, maybe there's some Himalayas, you know, some Nebraskas and the Himalayas. You say, no, no, let's go to Nebraska. If we're looking for aliens, why don't we look on alien planets where they live? Because that's we have that technology now as opposed to the, you know, the bucket of assumptions that you have to come up with in order to say like, oh, they're here right now. You know, they just happen to be here right now. And also, the very important thing, I called this the high beam argument. You know, to deal with the UFO stuff, you have to deal with all of, you have to answer these weird, irrational things that are happening. Like, okay, there's an advanced civilization that is visiting Earth regularly. They don't want to be detected. They've got super powerful technology, but they really suck at using it.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A way of sorting through enormous amounts of data and figuring out what you're going to throw out and what you're going to keep. And all these things we're used to doing in other scientific enterprises. And without that, if we don't do that, we're going to be having the same damn argument about these things for the next hundred years.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Software it does, what the limits of the software are possible. You have to know what happened to the camera. Was it refurbished recently? In every spectral wavelength, in all of its data collection and processing, you have to know all of those steps and have them all characterized. Because especially if you want to claim like, oh my God, I saw something take a right-hand turn at Mach 500, right? You better have all of that nailed down before you make that kind of claim. So we have to have characterized detectors looking up, down, and maybe on planes themselves. We need a rational search strategy. So let's say you want to lay out these ground-based detectors. Where do you put them? There's only so much money in the world. So, you know, do you want to put them near places where you've seen a lot of things beforehand or do you want to have them trying to do a sparse coverage of the entire country? And then you need the data analysts analysis, right? You're going to have so much data, so many false positives or false triggering that you.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you want to do ground based detectors that upward-looking ground-based detectors of the kind we're already building for meteors, right? For tracking meteors, you want to have space-based detectors, put them on satellites. This is what the NASA UAP panel was thinking about. And then probably on all we have lots of people in the sky, there should be detectors on the planes, or at least, you know, some kind of alert system that if a pilot says, oh, look, I'm seeing something I don't understand. Boop, presses the red button, and that triggers the ground-based space-based data collectors. And then the data collectors themselves, this is something that people really don't understand. And it's so important. In order to actually do science with anything, the data you have, you have to understand where it came from, like down to the, you know, the nth degree. You have to know how that camera behaves in a bunch of different wavelengths. You have to have characterize that. You have to know what the...”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so in the book I talked about the idea this is really stupid, but you want to look up, you want to look down, and you want to look all around.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About whether or not that piece of evidence lives up to the standards that we have. And we spent 400 years determining what those standards are. And that is why cell phones work, right? If you didn't have super rigorous standards about what you think that's, oh, this little antenna, I've invented a new kind of antenna that I can slip into the cell phone and I can show you that it works. If you didn't have these standards, every cell phone would be a brick, right? And when it comes to UFOs and UAPs, the evidence you have and the claim that though this shows that, you know, we are being visited by non-human advanced civilization just doesn't even come close.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am all in favor of an open, agnostic, transparent scientific investigation of view UFOs and UAPs. But the idea that there is any data that we have that links UFOs and UAPs to non-human technology, I just think the standards, they just none of what is claimed to be the data lives up to the standards of evidence. So let's just take a moment on that idea of standards of evidence because I've made a big deal about this both in the book and elsewhere whenever I talk about this. So what people have to understand about science is we are really scientists. We are really mean to each other. We are brutal to each other. Because we have this thing that we call standards of evidence. And it's the idea of like you have a piece of evidence that you want to link to a claim. And, you know, under what conditions can you say, oh, look, I've got evidence of, you know, this claim X, Y, and Z. And in science, we are so mean to each other.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right, right. Look at the way the missionaries, you know, missionaries had these interactions because they thought converting them to whatever religion they were was the most important. That's what the gain was. So from our perspective, I mean, we'd have to sort that out. I think given, you know, if we're doing this thought experiment, we are curious. And I think eventually we'd want to reach out to them.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's a great question. I mean, it's interesting how that even brings up the ethical questions, right? Let's say that, you know, we'd have to first sort of sort out what are the consequences for them and what do we feel our ethical responsibilities are to them?”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right? Because it's just like, you know, we're very much, we have a very particular kind of cognitive structure. And we're very governed by, even if you went and talked to, this is an interesting thing to think about. You know, if I could suddenly magically appear 100,000 years ago and talk to a hunter-gatherer about their worldview and their motivations, you know, I might find something that were no resemblance to things that I think are sort of, oh, that's what naturally humans do.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would first want to try and do this without it. Like, you know, if we're talking about the origin of life or the evolution of life on Earth, I'd want to do it just on its own without asking for this other layer. Because it requires a bunch of these other assumptions, which also have their own sort of breaking of causal chains. Because I don't really, like the idea that when you ask what would you do if you were an alien? But again, like alien minds could be so unbelievably different, right? That they wouldn't even recognize the question you just posed.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I understand the logic of what you're saying, but the problem for me with that is that right there, first you have to assume that alien civilizations are common, which I'm not sure about, that most of them may be dead, or they're not still, you know, like while I think that life is common, and again, this is just my biases, right? So now the problem is how do we sort out sort of the biases we're bringing or the assumptions we're bringing in from From the sort of causal chain that comes out of that.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't say that. It's not a simple thing, but it doesn't, you know, putting, I think, because, you know, all you're doing is kicking the can down the road, right? The aliens formed, right? So you're just saying like, all right, I'm just kicking the can down the road to the aliens. How did they, how did, what was their abiogenesis event?”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like 2001. Know it's a great story, but you know always with Occam's razor or whatever with science, if I can answer that question without that extra very detailed hypothesis, then I should. And the idea that evolution is a natural process, that's what I would go for first, right? That just seems, it's so much easier to do it that way than adding, you know, sort of, because it's kind of duos ex Machina thing of like, oh, then the aliens came down and they solved that problem that you're trying to solve by just coming down and putting their finger on the scales.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gotta look, gotta look, got to figure out ways to look. So, I, you know, I mean, I don't put it, it's not high on my list of, you know, things that I think are probable, but it certainly needs to be explored. And unless you look, you never know. So looking on the moon, look at where would we find if aliens had passed through the solar system anytime in the last three billion years, where might we find artifacts? Where might artifacts still be around? Earth? Probably not because of weathering and resurfacing. The moon's a good place. Certain kinds of orbits, you know, maybe they parked a probe in an orbit that was stable. So you got to figure out which orbits actually you could put something there and it'll last for a billion years. So those are the kind of questions. I don't, like I said, I don't, it's not high on my list of thinking this could happen, but it could happen. I certainly can't, unless you look, you don't know.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That language is actually embodied. Language is not just something that happens in your head, it's actually the whole experience. And she's the one who breaks through. And it just points to the idea that how utterly different the cognitive structures of a different species should be. So somehow we have to figure out how to think about it, but be so careful of our biases or figure out like a systematic way to break through our biases. And that just tells make science fiction movies. You know what I mean?”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, if they're long lived, they may just be like, we're not even interested. Like, we've done this. 10 billion years, or sorry, say 10 million years ago, we were really interested in this, in communicating with you, you know, youngins, but now we're not at all. And that's just, you know, one of the beauties of this, again, is how to think about this systematically because you're so far past the hairy edge, right, of our experience of what we know that you want to think about it, right? You don't want to be like, don't know, can't say anything because that's not fun. But you also have to sort of systematically go after your own biases, right? So one of the things I loved about Arrival 2 was, you know, Carl Sagan always had this idea, like, we'll teach a math. We'll teach him our math. Then they'll teach us their math. And then, you know, we'll be telling each other knock-nock jokes, you know, and swapping cures for cancer. And, you know, in the movie, like they send a Carl Sagan guy in and a linguist and the Carl Sagan guy fails immediately, right? And it's the linguist to understand.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Singing Kumbayah, but I just wouldn't assume that. It's also possible, though, that their cognitive structure is so different that we're not even living in the same universe in a certain way. I think we have to be prepared for that. We may not even be able to recognize each other in some way as cognizing beings. One of my favorite movies is Arrival. I don't know if you've ever seen that one. I really love that one because, you know, they literally, they have a different language. They have a different cognitive structure in terms of their language. And they're literally kind of living in a different physics.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Well, I think, you know, so this also, this general question also leads to MEDI messaging extraterrestrial intelligence. And I am definitely of the opinion of like you should be very careful. I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea to have your head below the grass. You know, the people who advocate like, oh, yeah, we should be sending powerful messages that are easily detectable into interstellar space. I'm like, why would you? Because we just don't know. Like, I'm not going to say they are warlike. I'm not going to say they're not warlike. I have no idea. But we sure as hell, first of all, who gets to decide that? The idea that a bunch of astronomers who happen to have a radio telescope, I don't, you know, who speaks for Earth, I think, which I think was a great book somebody wrote. So, you know, I definitely, we should be cautious, I would say, because we just have zero information. And the idea, you know, you used to have this idea of, well, if they're advanced, they've managed to survive. So, of course, they're going to be wearing togas, you know, and be, uh...”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an unholy mess. But, you know, but at some point, like the expansion into the solar system, say, like that would be both direction, I mean, depending on how you look at it, it was directional. There was a decision that the collective of human beings made to like anti-accrete, to start spreading out into the solar system. So that was definitely a goal there that may have been reached in some crazy sort of, you know, non-linear way, but it was still, right? There was still, it's still a goal was set and it was achieved.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biosphere because, again, but it destroys itself. It may not be very long term. It may be very potent for a short period of time, but that it's not sustainable. It doesn't become like we were talking about before, mature. It's very hard to make it into integrated into a mature bio slash technosphere. And of course, you know, evolution is not working for anything. Well, here's the actually interesting thing, right? So people are very much, you know, evolutionary biologists will get very, their hair will stand on it. And if you start talking about evolution having a purpose or anything. But the very interesting thing about purpose is that once you do get to an idea generating species or collective organism, yeah, then, you know, kind of all bets are off. And there is goals. There is teleology. There is a, you know, now suddenly, you know, absolutely there's a direction implied. So that's kind of the cool, interesting thing that once you get to that evolution stops being goalless and directionless. And suddenly, yeah, we're the ones who supply.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right. Because, yeah, cultural, it's amazing that cultural evolution totally disconnects from the Darwinian process. But I'd be careful. Like what we think of is ideas and culture. And, you know, it's quite possible we're going to make it another 200 years and this is gone, right? Because it actually wasn't a very good idea long term. I mean, we just don't know.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doesn't have to be. So, my favorite word word of the day is liquid brains, right? This idea of distributed cognition, which fascinating idea. And we've come to understand how much. Distributed cognition there is. Obviously, you social animals like termites, et cetera, and ants, that's an example of distributed cognition. The organism is the whole colony. This is one thing that's been really interesting in the state of the study when we cut to for aliens is that when we've come to recognize that human intelligence, it's not actually, it's been the kinds of things that go into intelligence are distributed all across the biosphere. Lots of different examples of things show various pieces of what we have. Jason Wright will describe today as like a deck of cards. The cards are all there. We got the hand that actually led to the kind of technological progress that we see. But the kinds of the basic idea of using tools, the basic idea of recognizing each other eye to eye, all the things that we define as intelligence, you can find many places and many other places across many other lineages across the earth. So it could be they could be very, very different with something like, yeah, maybe it's the hive mind.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it seems to be that contingency tends to win, right? The contingency, at least from what we can tell. I mean, that's not a hard result, but in those experiments, what you find is that accidents really do matter. So the idea, and this is important. So yes, you should expect legs or jointed sticks. How many joints they're going to be? Anybody's guess, things with a sensing apparatus on top of a shoulder with two arms and two legs? That's probably a... Pretty random set of occurrences that led to that.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But contingency is accidents, right? That, you know, you've got something that's evolving a certain kind of wing, a leathery wing, right? And then the climate changes and they all die out. End of story, or an asteroid, a total accident asteroid hits. And so contingency accidents play also a huge role in evolution. And one of the things that lots of evolutionary biologists have talked about is the idea that if you ran the tape of Earth's history over again, would you get the same creatures? Now Stephen Jay Gould was of the opinion that no way you wouldn't find anything on earth that resembled any species today. They've done experiments actually on this with E. coli. You take a bunch of E. coli, you let them evolve for a while, you take a bunch of them out, freeze them, let one, let that population continue to evolve. The other one's frozen. Now start it over again with the frozen.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that's one problem that has to be solved. One problem that has to be solved is I got to get to food, right? Another problem is I got to get away from predators, right? You've seen wings. We've seen wings, the line that went through dinosaurs to birds involved wings. Insects evolved wings. Mammals evolved wings. If the gas is dense enough, that a curved surface, if you move through the curved surface, it's going to produce lift. Yeah, there you go. Evolutional trip on that. So I think you can expect certain classes of solutions to the basic problems that life is going to be presented with, stay alive, reproduce. But one of the weird things about like with the UFO things is that you always see like, oh, they all look like humans. They're just like basically humans with, you know, triangular heads. And that's where we get to contingency, right? So what we've been talking about is convergence. You expect that evolution will converge on wings multiple times when presented with the problems that wings can solve.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And evolutionary contingency. So, you know, if you've got to move along a surface between hard surface and air, then the idea of some kind of jointed sticks makes sense that you're probably going to trigger that. If you look at Earth's history multiple times, multiple lineages that had nothing to do with each other are going to solve the problem of getting towards energy sources using some kind of stick-like apparatus.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So great question. And this question gets to the heart of thinking about life, right? About what life is. And this is the physical part of that. There's also sort of the informational part of it. But let's just talk about the physical part of it, which is, you know, life, anything that we're going to call life is probably going to work on Darwinian evolution. That's the nice thing about Darwinian evolution. Just like we know the laws of physics are general. The laws of Darwinian evolution are kind of this logic, this basic logic, that, you know, anything we'd reasonably call life probably has to operate under these kinds of principles. And so, you know, evolution is about solving problems to survive, that the environment presents. And the environment is always going to present these problems in physical and chemical terms so that you'd expect a kind of balance between what we call convergence evolutionary convergence.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leads us to if we're going to get to the blind spot. I am of the opinion, heretical in some camps, that the brain is not the minimal structure for consciousness. It's the whole body. It's embodied in some sense. It's communities, actually. So, yeah, so I don't, I mean, you know, I could be wrong, but this is, you know, this is what this whole work that I did with Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson, the philosophy of science, which is interesting because it leads to this question about, you know, oh, maybe we should just download ourselves into computers, right? That's another story that one tells. I'm super skeptical about those, but that's one of the narratives about interstellar travel is just like, and that anybody we meet is going to be a machine anyway, whether it's like, whether it's downloaded bodies or it's just going to be artificial intelligence. Like there's the whole idea of how long does biological evolution last? Maybe it's a very short period before everybody goes to, or the machines take over and, you know, kill.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Altered carbon. That's a great series. I think it's on Netflix. That's a really great series where that's exactly the idea of sleeves. Everybody's able to like, you know, you can re-sleeve in another body. And it raises exactly sort of this question. It's not the greatest cyberpunk, but it's pretty good. It's got some great, great action sequences too.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source